MarketTools Blog

This blog post revisits some practical tips from from Jolinda Decad, one of our MarketTools CustomerSat Research Consultants, who offered up great advice on survey design best practices for Voice of the Customer programs in a 10-minute interview that you can listen to here.

Here are some of Jolinda's key considerations to keep in mind when you develop your customer feedback surveys:

• Focus on a specific purpose: As you begin development, resist the urge to pull together a cross-functional team to start brainstorming survey questions. The best surveys focus on a specific purpose and ask only questions that are relevant and actionable. The more people involved, the more likely the purpose will be clouded and the more difficult it will be to get the information you need from the survey.
• Clarify survey objectives: What problems are you trying to solve by asking customers about their experience? Often companies are looking to understand how to meet their customers’ evolving needs within a particular touchpoint, and it’s helpful to think through the end-to-end customer experience within that touchpoint. For example, if you’re evaluating customer satisfaction in your contact center, you’ll want to think through the typical contact center experience and determine questions you could ask about each aspect of the experience, such as how long they are on hold, how they are greeted, how their issue was handled, if there was any follow-up, etc.
• Anticipate action: Think through how you might incorporate the survey results into decisions and actions. This will help you in two ways:
   
  First, it helps you determine the demographic variables you need for decision-making. If you want to make decisions based on customer segment, region, product lines, etc., you can ensure you include these demographic variables in the survey to more easily segment the data for analysis.
   
  Secondly, you can ensure that questions are asked in a way that drives clear action without setting false expectations. For example, if you sense that some customers want longer support hours but need a better idea of the number of customers that actually require this, you will want to ask whether the current support hours are meeting their needs without asking a question like “would you use support after-hours if it were available?” Not only is this question leading the respondent, it also sets the expectation that you’re considering extending support hours, which you may determine isn’t necessary if only a small percentage of customers feel their needs are not being met.

Check out the interview with Jolinda to learn more about how to design a great customer feedback survey from one of our EFM best practice consultants.

And as always, MarketTools offers ready access to experts in the fields of survey design, customer loyalty, and market research who can provide advice about best practices.  Let us know how we can help you!
 

Guest blogger Candy Michael is Vice President of Customer Feedback at American General Life Companies, one of the top insurance providers in North America – and a longtime MarketTools CustomerSat customer.

This past year, American General Life Companies launched a Voice of Producer (VOP) program series, to ensure that we deliver an exceptional customer experience for our distribution partners.  We leveraged our EFM system with MarketTools CustomerSat to maximize the success of our partner feedback program.

Our distribution partners are independent marketing organizations, insurance agencies and producers offering our products and services, plus those of our competitors.  Prior to our Voice of Producer program series, their opinions and satisfaction levels were filtered or anecdotal.  At times we heard that we were not easy to do business with in areas such as marketing tools, technology, and new business processing.

In today’s highly competitive world, we must know our distribution partners by understanding their needs, finding out what works for them and what doesn’t so we can respond.  The VOP program series is designed to survey American General’s distribution partners to:

• Determine overall satisfaction with us, so we can identify areas of dissatisfaction, pursue initiatives to increase satisfaction in various business areas and objectively measure results
• Gather input on specific distribution areas of focus to better differentiate our products and services from our competition
• Seek feedback on select products, services and transactions, which is usable for more finite measurements of service delivery and quickly identifying areas requiring service recovery activities.

The VOP program series design and development resulted from a collaboration between our Customer Feedback Office and key operational and internal marketing groups who served as a steering committee for soliciting feedback from distributors.  At one point we collected 11 topics and 200 questions from our committee!  Knowing that our distribution partners receive emails and surveys from many carriers, we did not want to frustrate respondents with long surveys covering multiple topics.  The outcome is that our VOP program series offers distinct surveys on specialized topics, covering Marketing Software and Advanced Sales tools, Underwriting and Issue, and Technology.

Averaging an 11% response rate, we leveraged MarketTools CustomerSat to conduct email-based surveys and send post-communication emails to 40,000+ respondents outlining their feedback and our action plan.  As a result, our business groups made modifications to business processes, including significant performance gains on software load times and an encrypted email attachment process.  All three VOP program series utilized segmentation within distribution upload records and branching, and skip patterns within CustomerSat to ensure that only relevant questions were displayed to appropriate respondents.  This same segmentation and question logic provided deep and relevant analytics, and comprehensive action management capabilities for each VOP program series. 

Our VOP Program series will be enhanced and expanded next year.  This year’s launch has given us a baseline measure of our distribution partners’ satisfaction and loyalty, in addition to establishing a service benchmark for key operational services.  Our EFM system, powered by MarketTools CustomerSat, has enabled us to provide powerful data collection and analytics to our organization to help us gain new insights about our partners in a cost-effective manner.
 

While designing just about any voice of the customer survey, many debate the right placement of their key customer satisfaction questions such as “Overall Satisfaction with the Company” (or OSAT) and “Willingness to Recommend”.  Some place these key questions at the beginning of their customer feedback surveys, while others lean towards placing these types of questions at the end. 

There’s no right or wrong answer to this issue of OSAT question placement.  However, the placement can and likely will alter your survey results, so it’s important to carefully consider which placement makes the most sense for your business needs.

Placing OSAT Questions First
Are you trying to capture your customers’ top of mind, immediate reaction response?  If the answer is yes, then questions about overall satisfaction with the company and likelihood to recommend or renew  should be placed up front in the survey design.  Be aware that placing OSAT questions at the beginning of your survey can yield higher scores than if you place them at the end – depending on the content of the rest of your survey questions.

The advantage of placing OSAT questions up front is that you’ll likely get a higher total number of responses to them—even if a respondent drops off later in the survey, you’ll still have captured data for them on the key questions.  Placing key questions first also means that if you make changes to content that comes later in the survey, you won’t have to worry about whether those changes will impact your key questions.

Placing OSAT Questions Last
Placing the key OSAT questions at the end of the survey allows you to walk your customers/clients through their entire experience with your company before they answer questions about overall satisfaction levels.  This may cause them to recall a certain experience or event that they might not have thought of immediately if you had asked them a key question up front.  Although this sometimes leads to lower scores on the OSAT questions, it can also help clarify areas for improvement and make them more obvious.   Placing key questions last also works well if a good amount of time has elapsed since the interaction you may be questioning, or if the last time you gathered this type of feedback happened a while ago.  As the customer goes through the preliminary parts of the survey, the questions can trigger memories they need to mindfully respond to OSAT questions.

However, if you decide to place OSAT questions at the end, then be aware that any change you make to the rest of your survey content can add bias and possibly change the outcome of the responses.  If you ask the OSAT questions up front, then at least you don’t have to worry about adding additional bias when other questions change; you also keep the ability to tweak your questionnaire without having to check how those changes will impact responses to other questions that come after.

What if I’m still not sure?
There are several options for survey design if you’re still unsure which placement is best for your program.  You can test your options: start your survey with placement of the questions in either the front of the survey or towards the end, gather data for a given time period, and review how the results trend.  Then test the questions in the alternate position for the same length of time to determine which results give you the best data to drive change.  One caution in this approach is to make sure that the customers you’re surveying for each test are similar in nature, since different client types can also give different results.   

Another option – which is not done often but can be insightful as well – is putting OSAT questions at both the beginning and end of the survey, but wording them slightly differently.  This will allow you to trend the results for both side by side over the same time period, so you can really see if the results are different in a way that helps you identify changes that will achieve your overall business goals. 

Whatever you decide in your survey design, make sure you own the choice you make for placement of these very fundamental questions.  It’s important to be able to use the results of the questions to determine your next move to increase not only satisfaction scores, but the value of your voice of the customer program as a whole.   Question placement really does impact your overall results, and it’s extremely important to make a well thought-out decision that you can stick with.
 

Guest blogger Karl Sharicz is Manager, Customer Intelligence at SimplexGrinnell, a Tyco International Company. SimplexGrinnell is a leader in fire and life-safety systems and services, with one million customers and150 local offices throughout the country – and a MarketTools CustomerSat customer.

The Net Promoter Score, or NPS*, has soared in usage over the past five years as a popular way to measure customer satisfaction.  Discussions of NPS as the “only” customer metric you need to measure in order to grow your business have been well documented and much debated.  Suffice it to say that those discussions have given NPS a higher level of visibility compared to the many other valuable customer metrics we may be measuring. 

But as we look at NPS from a reporting perspective, it becomes necessary to dissect and clarify this metric a bit further.

Pioneered by Fred Reichheld in a Harvard Business Review article published in 2003, the NPS approach prescribes just two customer satisfaction survey questions—one quantitative and the other qualitative:
-  “How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” and
-  “Could you please explain the reason why you rated us as you did?”
According to NPS theory, these are the only two questions you need examine in order to improve the customer experience and become more profitable as an organization.

For the “likelihood to recommend” question, a scale of 0 to 10 is used to score answers, where 0 means highly unlikely to recommend and 10 means highly likely to recommend. Answering that question with either 9 or 10 indicates you are a promoter, someone who who will advocate for a business. Answering with a 7 or 8 indicates you are passive or uncommitted. Answers from 0 through 6 indicate you are a detractor, or someone who is likely to dissuade others from engaging with a business. The percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors gives you your Net Promoter Score.

When NPS gets reported at a high level as a single metric, we tend to see it as indicative of the health of that business as seen from a customer perspective.  But when we hear, for example, that a particular auto manufacturer has earned a 76% NPS, we should still wonder exactly what that score refers to.  Is it an evaluation by car dealerships about the relationship they have with the manufacturer? An evaluation by consumers about their experience with the manufacturer?  Or an evaluation by consumers about their local car dealership?  We also need to know how that NPS number was derived: was it through a relationship-style survey or a transactional survey?  We can’t know any of this for sure unless we’re given the details. 

I believe that an NPS metric should be accompanied by the specific circumstances under which it was measured.  That way we can get a more definitive perspective on what is being evaluated and by whom. 

At SimplexGrinnell, we measure NPS within several targeted customer segments, and we use both relationship and transactional surveys to capture customer feedback.  We also measure and report NPS across multiple dimensions of the customer experience.  So when I’m asked, “What is your current NPS?” I answer, “Which NPS would you like to know about?”  The typical response I hear is, “You have more than one?”  We typically measure NPS for about 150 dimensions at any given time: by geographical location, by product category, by vertical market, by customer tenure, and by target customer.  And NPS is not the only customer metric we measure. 

We conduct transactional surveys of the end-users of our fire- and life-safety products from an inspection and service perspective.  We also survey contractors (distributors of our products) from a delivery and support perspective using a transactional survey instrument.  For our large national accounts, we conduct a hybrid relationship / transactional survey to measure across dimensions.  We also conduct surveys of our end-users to get their feedback from a pure relationship perspective.

Therefore when we report customer metrics, we have found it essential to specify the parameters around which the metric was derived. 

Overall, however, NPS is a calculated metric and by itself reveals very little unless you look at the three elements individually—promoters, passives, and detractors.  You need to look at how each component is trending over time in order to identify potential problems.  Then, in addition to the numbers, you need the verbatim commentary that accompanies high passive and detractor levels in order to obtain any degree of specificity as to what is helping to create those “less likely to recommend” customers. 

With that level of information, NPS measurements can better inform analysis of root causes of issues, and can support action management to resolve problems, as an extension of your NPS program.  Using NPS as actionable data, you give your NPS program the fuel to grow your business over the long haul.

^{* All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.}
 

Today we announced the latest major release of MarketTools CustomerSat, packed with exciting new features that make it easier than ever to collect feedback from customers across all touchpoints, analyze the Voice of the Customer to understand key drivers of satisfaction, and take action to close the loop.

Here’s a summary of new features in MarketTools CustomerSat that make the enterprise feedback management (EFM) process easier:

New Zoomerang Option for Survey Authoring:
MarketTools CustomerSat customers can now use Zoomerang Online Surveys & Polls to collect customer feedback, and import the survey results directly into CustomerSat for advanced analysis, reporting, and action management. This is a great way to extend survey programming across the enterprise and pull in Zoomerang surveys already being deployed in other departments for centralized analysis and reporting.

Expanded Ability to Share Voice of the Customer Data:
Sometimes you just don’t want to log-in to yet another web site to look at reports. We understand! We’re now giving administrators the ability to automatically publish PDF versions of role-based dashboards to users via email, making it easier to encourage discussion of your Voice of the Customer program internally!

Enhanced Adaptive Role-Based Reporting Charts:
A picture speaks a thousand words – and we’ve created some compelling new visuals to help you get the gist of your Voice of the Customer story at a glance: 

• New Key Metrics Scorecard: color-coded heat maps provide visual report cards of performance against company goals to help decision-makers focus on key areas for improvement.
• New Historical Benchmarking: quickly compare performance metrics across departments, divisions, geographies, product lines, etc., against historical benchmark data to understand performance trends across teams and identify areas that require more focus.
• New Stacked Bar Chart: easily compare performance against key metrics and evaluate survey results across segments with new color-coded stacked bar charts.
• Enhanced Key Trends and Comparative Statistics Reports: view performance over time across a greater range of question types to identity trends over time and compare key metrics across segments.

New Action Management Email Templates:
Another time-saving measure – we’re now providing email templates for action management so you can send follow-up emails about cases faster and more consistently.  

This is just the latest in a series of ongoing MarketTools CustomerSat releases designed to make it easier for you to understand your customers and continue to build satisfaction and loyalty.  Read the announcement to learn more about CustomerSat's new features.

Last week I attended Customer Management IQ’s Customer Insight Week in Chicago, and had the opportunity to meet with leaders from around North America in the Voice of the Customer space. Although the speakers represented both B2B and B2C organizations across all major industries, there were some common themes across all of the presentations:

• Customer-facing employees are crucial to customer satisfaction:
  Or, as my 6th grade self would say, “duh.” But seriously, as obvious as this sounds, many, many organizations still don’t have structured programs in place to ensure customer-facing employees are given the tools, training and motivation to provide excellent customer service. Think about all the call centers you’ve reached where you still can’t get someone to answer a question or discuss a situation that's “off the script.” I was thrilled to hear that more and more organizations, including American Express and Best Buy, were no longer providing scripts to call center agents but instead focusing on extensive training that helps customer service agents, as American Express put it, “service a relationship, not a transaction.” They focus on hiring the right employees that are passionate about providing good customer service, knowing that they can teach the technical skills as long as the right attitude is present. In addition to smart hiring practices, they also changed the metrics to measure agents based on satisfaction scores instead of length of the call – helping to move people “from robots to ambassadors.”
• Significant ROI can be found in increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty:
  Organizations often struggle to understand the ROI of a Voice of the Customer program. It seems like the right thing to do, but where is the concrete evidence of an improved bottom line? Fortunately, as programs mature and more data is available to track over time, more and more companies are showing ROI for their VOC programs. American Express analyzed their “promoters” (customers who actively promote the company to others) and found that they were their most profitable set of customers – both in terms of spending more and costing less to retain. And Charles Schwab found that their “promoters” really do recommend their services – most new clients provide “referral from someone I trust” as the number one reason they chose Schwab. They even suggested that the budget normally spent on advertising could shift to spending on loyalty programs and customer service training since they see more tangible results from providing excellent customer service.
• Sharing and taking action are key:
  As the presenter from Charles Schwab put it, they initially had lots of surveys and lots of data, but no one was paying attention. Most companies ask for customer feedback in this day and age, but unfortunately many still don't use action management practices to follow up on the results of this feedback. Schwab’s mantra is “only ask if ready to act”, and they literally don’t bother asking questions they can’t do anything about.  As part of their Voice of the Customer program, managers now make all follow-up calls within 24 hours to close the loop with unhappy customers.
   
  In another presentation, MarketTools customer Philadelphia Insurance talked about sharing VOC results with customers, internal teams and individuals through different levels of customer feedback reporting that occur daily, weekly, monthly and annually. What’s more, their Regional Vice Presidents personally call all detractors—causing several initially upset customers to quickly back down from their original negative comments and become raving fans of the company.

These are just a few examples of how companies are getting real impact from their Voice of the Customer programs across several different types of industries. If you haven’t been to an industry event in this space, I highly recommend it as a great opportunity to share and learn from others! Next week we’ll be at the ICMI Call Center Conference and will return with more great tips to share!
 

This week MarketTools participated in the 7th Customer Experience Management Conference here in San Francisco – and customer experience, customer satisfaction, and customer retention executives from far and wide took part in interactive sessions presented by Voice of the Customer (VOC) leaders concerning the measurement and improvement of the customer experience. 

Since MarketTools was a Platinum Sponsor of the event, I had the privilege of serving as the Conference Chairperson for the opening day of the event. The sessions examined a variety of topics important to the audience, and I thought I'd share some of the highlights:

• Jeff Radecki, Customer Experience Design Manager at Best Buy, explained that his contact centers handled more than 2 billion customer “touches” last year, and they’ve simplified their phone tree and handle most of the calls in the U.S. to improve customer satisfaction.  In the highly competitive consumer electronics retail industry, Best Buy believes that the customer experience, both in store and after purchase, is a major differentiator for them. As a result, Best Buy makes sure to train their contact center agents so well, they don’t need scripts!
• Simon Leech, Senior Vice President of Insurance Services at American General Life Companies (and a MarketTools CustomerSat customer), discussed how his team put the Voice of the Customer into action at this major insurance company.  Through customer feedback, they’ve learned that the best way to improve the customer experience isn’t always the most obvious.  For example, the company had initially planned out an initiative to expedite the process for paying death benefits, thinking that receiving payout checks faster would improve customer satisfaction.  What they learned from their customers, however, was that it was far more important to them to deal with an empathetic agent who would take the time to thoroughly explain the process.  By investing in an agent training program instead of re-engineering the payout process, American General saw a significant increase in customer satisfaction scores with much less investment.
• Kelly Harper, Director, Brand & Customer Experience for the BMO Financial Group in Canada, works hard to ensure that her employees understand how the customer experience they deliver helps to support the company’s brand attributes.  Kelly’s focus is to make sure that staff is given the right tools to deliver a great customer experience – and they devote a lot of time and resources to capturing employee feedback to help make that happen.
• Jeff Stevenson, Community Manager with Intuit’s Turbo Tax division, created the @TeamTurboTax Twitter handle to engage with customers where they are – online using social media.  They have an in-house team of 11 people who triage tweets about Turbo Tax and direct them to the in-house “experts” from various parts of the company, including customer care, product and PR, who can handle the question/issue.  During tax season, the company now helps more customers via Twitter in a single week than they did during the entire tax season a few years ago.  The ultimate benefit: customers helped through Twitter were 70% more likely to recommend TurboTax!

At the end of the first day, MarketTools hosted the conference attendees at a networking cocktail event at the event venue near Fisherman’s Wharf – and out-of-towners were lucky to enjoy some gorgeous weather as they watched the sailboats on the bay. 

Conference season is in full swing, and we’re looking forward to hearing more from VOC leaders and discussing new directions for customer experience management and enterprise feedback management technologies.  Next up: IQPC Customer Insights Week September 26 to September 29 in Chicago – we hope to see you there!

A few weeks back I was lucky enough to attend Dreamforce (Salesforce.com’s user conference), and like most people I spoke with, I was blown away. I think I was most impressed by the fact that, unlike other high tech events that are guilty of promoting ideas or technology still years from being a reality, Salesforce’s vision of the Social Enterprise is relevant NOW.

It was only a few years ago that I literally “LOL’d” at the commercials showing tribes in Africa thanking a computer company for bringing them the internet ‒ I didn’t buy it. And even in the past few years when people talked about promoting B2B businesses on Facebook, I rolled my eyes, thinking no one really wants that kind of relationship with a corporation. But we’re finally entering a time where it makes sense to bridge the gap between social customers and social employees. The time has come to understand and communicate with customers in new ways that leverage the information customers are already making available to you.

One of the drivers of the Social Enterprise is the ability to begin “delighting customers in a whole new ways”, which essentially means knowing who they are and what they “like” – on Facebook or otherwise. By bringing together traditional CRM customer data with social media data, AND making it easy for your employees to socially engage with customers, you now have a whole new relationship with your customer and a lot more ways to delight them. Many of our customers are already doing this with our Social Media solutions, while other organizations are just starting to see the relevance for their business. The bottom line is that social media is finally getting to the point where it could become less about your vacation photos and more about making your voice heard to organizations, governments, and of course, your peers.

And while it may initially sound a bit Big Brother, there are actually huge benefits for customers who participate. First of all, individuals can control their image and access to their information online. They can decide what to share and what not to share, and fortunately Facebook is continually improving its privacy settings. Then by making their voices heard and engaging their peers in open discussions online, customers can help create changes as small as packaging design or as large as bringing down corrupt governments. This is real, and it’s already happening.

So what does that mean for traditional Voice of the Customer programs? More opportunity to capture customer feedback more often and in more relevant, personalized ways. Survey programs won’t be replaced by social media, but rather they’ll take advantage of social networks for more relevant discussions and more timely sharing of results. I also think expectations for action will increase – unlike private surveys, when customers know you’re collecting their feedback through social media, they will expect you to tell them what action will be taken as a result of their input.

It all leads to increased transparency, a shifting of the relationship between consumers and business and a new way of looking at life, work and the grey area in between. I’m now a believer – what about you? Tell us what impact you think social media has made or will make on the way you interact with customers.
 

This is a follow-up to a previous post offering three tips to effectively start a program to tie customer feedback to employee compensation.  

For some customer-centric organizations, now is the time to take broadly-shared customer feedback and use that data to motivate and compensate employees.  An effective employee compensation program is based on a mature and healthy voice of the customer program, gauged by the appropriate metrics, and structured with the right goals and rewards. 

But to keep your employee compensation program on the right track, you need to watch out for the following issues:

• Guard against manipulation.  
  The dark side of tying feedback to compensation is that you give employees a good reason to scrutinize the data (best case) or manipulate the numbers (worst case).  Trustworthy data is the foundation of a good feedback-based compensation program and you must work to protect it!
   
  Here’s one example I’ve run into several times: organizations that actively follow up with customers who give low scores sometimes feel those customers made a mistake and meant to give a 10 instead of a 0.  They innocently ask whether they can change the data to “correct” this.  My answer is nearly always a resounding NO!   Systematically changing negative answers to positive ones like this biases your results. (After all, you’re not calling those 10s and asking if they actually meant to give a 0, right?)  Suspected problems with survey comprehension should be solved in the survey.  Not in the dataset after the fact.
   
  You must also be on the lookout for manipulation of the respondent sample.  Is it possible to systematically mis-record customer email addresses or pass only certain interactions into an IVR survey to make sure only the best interactions are surveyed?  Might individuals within the organization remind their favorite customers to take the annual survey but “forget” about the customers they know are dissatisfied?  Do your reps or sales reps directly encourage customers to give good scores?  All of these can bias the final results and de-legitimize your program.
• Make your compensation goals visible, and get employee buy-in.  
  Your compensation program is a pointless exercise if members of your organization don’t take the program to heart and really strive to drive good scores.  To encourage buy-in, make sure everyone knows what the metric(s) and target goals are, how they are calculated, how exactly people in their position can move the needle, and what’s in it for them if they do.  They should also be able to see the most current scores as often as is practical.
   
  You might consider starting off the first year with a focus on upside only, and give an extra bonus for meeting certain customer feedback targets.  In a support or sales organization, think about spot bonuses monthly or quarterly for top performers to keep the metrics (and how each employee can impact them) front of mind.  Small token prizes can also be used this way on a more frequent basis (e.g. $10 Starbucks gift card for the support rep with the most perfect scores that week).
   
  As far as making the data visible, I have one client whose call center walls are practically wallpapered in customer feedback data and goalposts—that’s the right philosophy!  (As a side note: Save a tree and your sanity and use an enterprise feedback management tool like MarketTools CustomerSat Role-Based Reporting to make it really easy to share the right type of data by specific role, at any level of the organization.)

The key goal for tying customer feedback to compensation is to motivate employees to provide the highest level of customer service.  By linking feedback data that helps employees both to grow professionally and gain financial rewards, you’ll empower them to deliver the kind of customer experience that gives your company a true competitive advantage.
 

As customer feedback solutions evolve to include new capabilities for sharing feedback with employees at all levels, companies that strive to become more customer-centric are looking to tie customer feedback to compensation.  The idea is that this helps motivate employees to provide the highest level of customer service. 

There are many differing opinions and ongoing discussions on this topic – but if you’re ready to start tying customer feedback to compensation within your organization, here are three critical steps to get you started.

1)   Start with a MATURE and HEALTHY customer feedback program.  
By mature, I mean you’ve been collecting data a year or more, you’ve got a good sense of where your scores fall out and how stable they are, your data has been shared and generated interest within all levels of the organization, and you’ve done enough analysis to really understand how various customer experiences drive your outcome metrics.  By healthy, I mean you’ve got a good survey response rate, you’re confident in your customer databases, and customers seem to understand and accurately answer your surveys.  If you try to tie feedback to compensation before your program (and your understanding of it) is ready, you’re at huge risk of having the whole program crash and burn because the numbers are too volatile or not credible, or because you can’t confidently describe to employees how they can move the satisfaction needle in their day-to-day work.    

2)  Choose a metric.  Maybe more than one.  
There’s no one-size-fits-all metric here: every industry (and every business) will have different goals and a different model for customer loyalty.  Ideally, you should take your year or more of survey data and tie it to actual customer behavior with respect to your organization.  Which survey metrics best predicted actual repurchase, renewal, or increased spend?  Those are your corporate-level metrics.  Are there certain specific experiences that contribute to high scores on those metrics?  Those might be sub-metrics for certain teams (e.g. satisfaction with support or sales).  You should choose metrics that are stable, that you understand well from your historical data, and that employees will feel they can actually impact.

As you consider the right metrics to use in your employee evaluation, be sure to look out for competing goals and policies within your company.  For example, maybe your analysis suggests that call center representatives should be teaching the customer something new during a support incident to really drive customer loyalty.  That sounds like a perfect goal to base compensation on within the call center—it’s tied to outcomes and directly within the control of the support rep.  But if the organization also has a conflicting goal around keeping calls short, you’re setting reps up to fail at one goal or the other.  That’s no way to get buy-in from your front line employees!

3)  Structure your program around the right goals. 
Once you’ve chosen your metric(s) your next job is to figure out the target goal you’ll be evaluating employees against, and what employees will get if they deliver!  This is yet another area where your historical data is critical.  What kinds of increases in scores are realistic, given the movement you’ve seen in the past?  How large would an increase have to be for you to be confident it’s not just noise in the data?  Or should your goal simply be to maintain a current score (yes—sometimes this is OK too!).  Do you have enough responses to accurately calculate scores at the individual level (HINT: in my experience you very rarely do!), or should compensation be based on team or corporate scores (or a combination of the two)? 

You’ve also got to consider what proportion of compensation will be based on customer feedback vs. other goals and evaluation.  In my experience, somewhere between 10% and 20% seems to be the sweet spot.  Less than 10% and the organization doesn’t pay much attention.  But if you get too far past 20%, I find many organizations start to scrutinize every single data point – which quickly becomes unproductive and distracting.

These steps are meant to put you on the path toward tying customer feedback to compensation in a meaningful and effective way within your organization – click here for tips on keeping your compensation program on the right track.